The biblical proverbs owe a portion of their potency to what we might call the shock-and-recognize phenomenon. The pithy statements that are the warp and woof of this wisdom anthology are capable of startling with the apparent novelty of a declaration, then allowing the reader to settle back into the realization that, yes, he always felt that way but wouldn’t have found the words to say so.
So do the occasionally hilarious ‘sayings of Agur’ lay themselves out upon the page. Numbering things that are wonderful, scandalous, or some variant of the two, they practice shock-and-recognition as an almost pedagogical convention:
Three things are too wonderful for me;
four I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a girl.
it is the fourth of these, the one that almost escaped in the initial three-fold configuration, that boggles the mind then becomes quickly familiar. The eagle in the sky is splendid. The snake on the rock, similarly remarkable in its coiling, improbably movement. The fact that a ship can get from point A to point B without nature overwhelming it and swallowing it up seems, at least to landlubbers, almost impossible.
Yet the way of a man with a girl. It seems so ordinary, so quotidian. But no, it is upon further review a counterintuitive miracle of sorts. Whether Agur refers to the dynamics of the soul that we call courtship or the movements upon a bed that we call sex, it is simply beyond comprehension when one pauses to put one’s mind to it.
Agur was right. The ordinary carries wonder in its bosom.
Canter Bridge 
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